Samsung Officially Launches Galaxy Tab

The iPad now officially has a bona fide rival, as Samsung has announced the Galaxy Tab at IFA 2010.

The 7in tablet sports a 1,024 x 600 resolution display, a touch less than the 1,024 x 768 on the iPad, but a higher pixel density than Apple's 9.6in slate. It’s powered by a beefy 1GHz Cortex A8 processor and runs Android 2.2, which means it nominally supports Adobe Flash 10.1.

At 380g it is almost half the weight of the iPad 3G (730g) , but packs in more features. There’s a three megapixel camera on the rear, and a 1.3 megapixel camera at the front – so Skype calling should be on the cards. Samsung is also touting a Google Goggles feature – where you can perform a search just by taking an image of a landmark or piece of artwork.

Connectivity is comprehensive with 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 and built-in 3G HSUPA; the latter will allow you to make calls but only via the in-built loudspeaker, or a Bluetooth headset - there is no conventional earpiece.

There will be two memory configurations – 16GB or 32GB – but either way there’s a SD card slot for adding up to 32GB of extra storage. You’ll likely want to fill that up as the Galaxy Tab is fully DivX certified, and also natively supports Xvid, MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 formats too.

While it’s clearly got the iPad beat on the hardware side, Samsung has addressed the software side of things too with a Reader’s Hub to provide eBooks, magazines and newspapers with a pool of over 2,500 titles.

The Galaxy Tablet is due to arrive in Europe in late September, and will be followed by a US release.

The only thing we’re waiting to hear now is the price. Knowing Samsung, it’s likely to be very competitive - 3G iPads are £529 and £599 for the 16GB / 32GB respectively - and it all mounts up to an impressive package that clearly indicates that that tablet wars have officially begun.